Media, Messages and Emotions

Love
and hate, it’s always been the same, right? Not necessarily, according to the
authors of Doing Emotions History
(University of Illinois Press). As pointed out by the editors of the essay
collection, Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, emotions are biologically and culturally constructed, at least in
their human expression. Emotion, not unlike economics, has a history. And the
sort of people who try to understand history without reference to emotions are
like the deluded economists who believed only in rational self-interest (and
helped drive the world economy into the ditch in 2008).

Surprisingly,
for a collection of this kind, essays on emotions in China and Eastern Europe,
and religion and emotion, aren’t joined by an exploration of how Hollywood has
contributed to the construction of contemporary emotionalism. The closest stab
comes in the chapter called “Media, Messages, and Emotions” by University of
Pittsburgh communications professor Brenton J. Malin. Malin surveys the history
of concerns over “emotional over stimulation” that began with Socrates’ worry
that the written word “cannot make choices about where and when not to communicate.” He compared written
texts to a pharmakon—a drug. Malin
quotes a 19th century physician alarmed by that anxiety-inducing new
invention, the telegraph, because of its potential for delivering unexpected
news at unexpected moments. If correct, then imagine how batty today’s texting
addicts must be!

In
1916 American psychologist Hugo Munsterberg aptly noted, “to picture emotions
must be the central aim of the photoplay,” and hoped the conventions of theater
wouldn’t hinder the development of cinema along those lines.

On the
other side, the psychologists who wrote the monographs collected as the Payne
Fund Motion Picture Studies (1933) evoked Socrates by comparing the effects of
movies to a drug. As with the drugs prescribed by physicians, motion pictures
can offer escape from life’s pain, but the “continuous or frequently repeated
emotional stress” of movie plots and images “lead to a neurotic condition.” Too
many movies can drive you nuts? Just glance at what’s gone viral on You Tube
for evidence.

The
Payne Studies led to the prevailing trend in psychology of imagining that mass
communication transmits ideas or images to more or less passive recipients—like
stimuli to zombies. The distance is short from this hypothesis to the notion
that listening to Black Sabbath records turns teens into killer occultists. The
Payne Studies helped foster such reductive and anti-humanistic claptrap by
attaching “psycho-galvonometers” to test subjects watching movies in a lab. In
the minds of some scientists, this registered as proof. But as is often the
case, scientific evidence is in the minds of the interpreter.

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